amkean pronunciation

I finished the first season of Mad Men. It's a terrific show. It has interesting, complex characters, high production values so that it's visually gorgeous, and long, complex, and intriguing plot arcs. The show just got better and better as the season went on, as more and more information came out, and as you got to know the show better, and as the plot arcs played out. I also watched the Texas Cheerleader Scandal Lifetime movie, and was less impressed by that movie. To illustrate a difference, the characters in the Lifetime movie were caricatures; one-dimensional villians, with nothing of redemptive value. It drove me crazy, and if I had been in control of the remote, I would have turned it off. Contrast that to, say, Pete Campbell on Mad Men. So far, he's not even in the top few characters we've been given the most information about, yet I don't think I've ever seen a character quite like him on a show. He, like every other character on Mad Men, has good and bad qualities. So you root against Pete and for Don for reasons you might not be able to explain, since Don's no boy scout himself. The show's imbued with the sexism of 1960, which makes it all the more delicious when Pete's secretary is disrespectful towards him. They make jokes on the show about how times have changed (e.g., drunk driving attitudes, doctor-client privilege trumped by man owning wife), but not so much that it gets annoying. Although the characters live in a sexist world, the show isn't sexist. The women are really interesting.

I went to the filousa cabin Saturday night for a short overnight visit. I brought the dogs, who got another pontoon ride. It wasn't as cathartic as my last Luck visit, but I'm still glad I went. This was after I ran the Richfield half marathon in the morning. I tried to run fast, but I've somehow lost fitness since the marathon by running only sporadically.

The run might had gone better had I not had to dive back to second base last Wednesday night when a ground ball was hit to shortstop, covered by the angry third baseman, and I tried to get his attention to get the batter to first. He faked a throw to first, I fell for it because I'm a greedy baserunner, and then had to dive back headfirst to second. I hit the ground hard and can still feel it today. I haven't been running since Saturday.

Labels: running, softball, tv